Ideally, we will never sell a single penny’s worth of crypto and the market will rise naturally, organically, up and down, higher and higher forever.

Big upswings, big downswings, fast times, slow times, bull and bear markets, but nothing so extreme that we need to abandon our stakes in the financial networks of the future.

That’s a nice thought but unlikely to happen. You don’t want to sit through an 80% drop in your portfolio and wait two more years to get back to even.

If you’re following my plan, you’ve suffered painful, frustrating, sometimes long-lasting downswings and big, sudden drops, but nothing that serious.

Let’s try to keep it that way. If that means we have to sell, so be it.

Read below for a few ideas from myself and others. Nothing too specific.

As you read it, you’ll need to consider your country’s laws and taxes, as well as your financial situation, personal goals, risk tolerance, investment strategy, what you plan to do with your gains, and all the other things that make your situation—and decision—unique.

At the end, I’ll briefly share my personal strategy.

Hopefully, you find the information and links useful. Leave your thoughts and comments at the bottom of this post!

Prepare now

This market moves fast and a lot can go wrong on your way to the exit.

When the time comes to sell, prices will go haywire, with massive swings from day to day, hour to hour. Exchanges will fail. Wallets will go into “maintenance.” DEX fees will skyrocket. Smart contract flaws will screw people over.

Act now to make the exit as fast and easy as possible.

Check your wallets, keys, and passwords

Do you know what sucks?

Getting locked out of your wallet or exchange account.

To avoid this, confirm your backup phrase and private keys now. Write those down and keep them someplace safe.

Log into all of your exchanges to make sure 2FA works correctly and you have the right passwords. If you need to reset your password, do that now.

Set your email’s spam filter to catch exchange emails. On their FAQ pages, most exchanges have instructions for whitelisting their emails in your spam filter. Follow those instructions.

KYC if you need to

If you use an exchange that requires KYC to withdraw your crypto, you’ll want to complete that process now.

While the process usually takes a few minutes or less, it’s a hassle and sometimes takes days to complete.

Since you’re going to use the exchange anyway, you might as well do your KYC now. One less thing to worry about later.

Prepare to unstake

If you have staked altcoins with lock-up periods, make sure you account for the time it will take to unstake them.

For example, Aave takes 10 days to unstake. As a result, you need to start the process at least 10 days before you sell. Other altcoins have different schedules.

Make sure you have enough tokens to cover the gas and transaction fees when applicable. Most likely, on-chain transaction fees will go up a lot when the market is hot enough to force us to sell, even on “low-cost” blockchains.

Airdrops, anybody?

You may discover strange tokens you don’t remember buying. Most likely, these came from airdrops. Check the CoinGecko listing for the ticker that appears in your wallet and confirm the contract address with the relevant blockchain explorer.

(ChatGPT can walk you through this.)

Often, you can sell these on Uniswap or public exchanges.

Sometimes, you need to use a specific website. That’s a big red flag—most likely, a scam designed to induce you to connect your wallet to a website that will rip you off.

Send all these tokens to a new wallet you create for this express purpose. Keep that wallet separate from anything else, do not send any crypto from that wallet, and use only that wallet to connect to websites associated with those tokens.

That way, if you get ripped off, you lose only the free crypto you didn't even know about.

Get your finances straight

What will you do with your proceeds? Keep them in stablecoins? Cash them out? Something else?

Do you know how much you’ll end up with? Did you account for taxes?

If you’re not tracking your portfolio, now’s a good time to start. I use the CoinGecko portfolio tracker. Tap this button and click “Portfolio” to get the tracker.

You may use another service or do it yourself.

I also use the Empower dashboard to see how my crypto holdings fit into my overall financial portfolio. Once you set up your dashboard, you can see all your debts, assets, and even your crypto holdings in one view, with calculators and estimators to help you decide what to do with your windfall.

Tap this button to try it out. It’s free, and you get $50 if you decide to link your accounts.

The taxperson cometh

Do you know how you’ll be taxed on your crypto?

In high-tax countries, you may end up paying so much to the government that it makes more sense to HODL through the crash.

For example, if you will pay 50% tax on your gains to avoid a 50% crash in the paper value of your crypto, on top of exit fees, is it worth selling?

Probably, yes, because you will reset your basis, saving you money on future taxes after you buy back into the market. But only you can know. You’ll want to run the math for yourself. These decisions are never as simple as they seem!

If, like me, you live in a low-tax country with ample legal ways to shelter your gains from the government, did you factor in deductions, basis, tax-loss harvesting, and other strategies that can lower your taxes further?

For example, in the US, crypto gets treated as property, with capital gains and losses for every transaction except transfers to/from your own wallets. You pay taxes or take deductions based on the difference between the price when you got the crypto and the price when you sold it or sent it to somebody else.

This gives you some benefits. For example, if you hold your crypto for more than a year, you pay 20% maximum, with no tax for those who have less than $40,000 total income. If you hold your crypto for less than a year, you get taxed at the same rate as normal income, but you have lots of ways to offset that tax (e.g., contribute to an IRA, harvest losses from other assets, the list goes on).

This changes from person to person. You may have the exact same portfolio, allocation, and amounts, but the best decision for you may be different than somebody else's simply because of the tax implications.

As far as how to account for your taxes?

I wish I knew! I turn my records over to a tax prep service with as much detail as possible and hope they figure out everything correctly.

(Privately, I hope the IRS audits me so I know what I actually owe!)

Know what it will cost to exit

Nothing in life is free.

For DEXs, you need to pay gas fees.

For traditional exchanges, you need to pay at least three fees: one when you move your crypto to the exchange, another when you trade, and a third when you withdraw.

To help you estimate the costs of withdrawing from a centralized exchange, check WithdrawalFees.com.

Use the Etherscan gas tracker to figure out gas fees for Ethereum DEXs.

(For other blockchains, you probably don’t need to check in advance. The fees aren’t that high and they don’t change as often.)

Plan your exit route

How will you get your money out of the market? What path will you take?

With a little planning, you can reduce time, fees, and effort.

For example, you can move your altcoins to one or a few exchanges, trade them all for the same currency, then withdraw in that single currency one time, rather than pulling it out of the market in bits and pieces.

Or, before you send any crypto to an exchange, you can first consolidate your positions through DEXs and aggregators, such as:

• Ethereum and EVM-Compatible Blockchains: Uniswap (Uniswap Docs)

• Crosschain A: Dodo DEX (DODO Docs)

• Crosschain B: Thorswap (Thorswap Docs)

• Cosmos: Osmosis (Support Lab)

• Avalanche: Trader Joe (Support Center)

• Cardano: Minswap (Introduction and Documentation)

• Solana: Jupiter (Guides)

Some wallets like BlockWallet, Rabby, Keplr, and others have an embedded swapping feature.

If you only hold Bitcoin, you only need to move your Bitcoin from your personal wallet to any exchange, then sell for cash or stablecoin. Or, you can skip that step with Bisq or Changelly.

In the end, you will consolidate positions into one or a few tokens you’ll send to a centralized exchange as a single transaction. Alternatively, you can sell each of your positions for stablecoins on DEXs, but you’ll still need a centralized exchange to convert the stablecoins to cash.

This can get confusing! Map it out now. You could even draw out the path so you can “see” the movement, like so:

Seems silly, but it’s helped me.

If that’s not your thing, feel free to use this template spreadsheet to plot your course. I filled in some dummy rows as examples, you should delete those or write over them.

Not the most user-friendly, I know. It’s just a spreadsheet.

After you put your information into the cells, you can use the filter to group your list by currency, exchange, destination, and any other category.

Once you do that, you’ll see the connections and overlap to help you coordinate your actions. The filter button looks like an upside-down triangle near the top of each column.

With this approach, I simplified my actions to just a few exchanges and currencies.

Whatever system you use, you probably want to get as close as you can to one address, one withdrawal, and one destination. You may already have done that!

Expect delays and problems

You can’t know what problems might crop up, but you can anticipate something will go wrong at some point. Account for problems beyond your control.

Bugs in smart contracts? Customer service delays? Exchange SNAFUs? Wallets under maintenance?

What about insufficient gas fees for DEX exchanges? Steep withdrawal fees for traditional exchanges? Transaction fees to move the crypto around?

Are you prepared for exchanges to crash and transactions to get blocked? Withdrawal limits? Whitelisting rules that prevent you from moving your crypto for 1-7 days? Compliance checks or holds on your accounts?

Wait until the time’s right

Once we see the signals of Bitcoin’s market cycle peak, we will sell Bitcoin first and altcoins shortly after that.

(You may even want to start selling earlier than that, just in case we don’t see those signals, altcoins don’t go bonkers, and the crash comes sooner than expected.)

Start now and don’t rush, just prepare.

That way, you can act decisively when the time comes. You will know what to do with your crypto, roughly how much it will cost, and how everything should turn out. You will have already organized your affairs.

After you sell, you can enjoy the fruits of the harvest and prepare for what comes next: a chance to re-accumulate your crypto at a massive discount.

My exit plan

For altcoins, I will sell into their base currencies (ETH, ATOM, ADA, etc), then send the tokens to Coinbase and Gemini to convert them into cash or stablecoins.

What will I do with that cash and stablecoins?

I’ll use the cash to pay off the lines of credit I drew from to buy my crypto.

(Once the market turns around, I’ll draw against those lines of credit to buy crypto again.)

I’ll keep the USDC on Coinbase while I wait for Bitcoin’s price to fall into the buying zone of my plan.

Feel free to share this post with anybody who might find it useful or interesting. You don’t need this information now, but you will eventually—maybe sooner than you expect.

Relax and enjoy the ride!